


Dusky Feathers

by fiendlikequeen



Series: Sherlock (TV) Dæmon!AU Series [1]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemon, Daemons, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 13:12:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiendlikequeen/pseuds/fiendlikequeen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft never wanted his dæmon to settle. But all dæmons do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dusky Feathers

Mycroft had never wanted Aisa to settle. As a child, he’d loved his dæmon’s ability to change her form, to shift, to adapt. He delighted to watch her scuttle up his arm as a scorpion, sting raised, then twist about his wrist as a green-eyed serpent, before climbing to his shoulder with the tiny sharp claws of a marmoset, where she’d perch in the form of a sharp-eyed sparrow hawk.

When she shifted, she was a creature of the most artful subterfuge; for when she changed so fast, no one could anyone read her form or her actions to betray Mycroft. Her shifting made her imperceptible and made his moods difficult to read.

“But we’re going to have to settle someday, Mycroft,” she’d told him, seated by his side as a caracal. “Someday soon. You know that.”

He looked down at her, saw her blink and flick her tail, almost imperceptible signs of anxiety. Her ears were laid back, not with displeasure but with listless complacency.

He was twelve, both big for his age and equally precocious, already dressing in the three-piece suits left behind by his father. He’d heard his mother’s barn owl dæmon screech when he paraded about in the clothes that still smelled like Pirate’s Gold cologne.

“I do,” he said, and stroked her fur to soothe her and to soothe himself. “Still, it doesn’t have to be before it’s absolutely necessary, yes?”

“Not until then,” she’d agreed, and shifted into a gaunt lizard, crawling up onto his hand, nestling into his palm, close as she could get. He lifted her to his face and she flicked out her tongue and touched his cheek.

He’d never wanted her to settle, but it happened as it did to everyone.

“We can’t escape it,” Aisa said to him, ever practical.

But Aisa continued to change, shifting forms faster than any dæmon Mycroft had ever seen. Unlike the dæmons of his friends, who had begun to favour certain forms over others, Aisa had not. She still flicked from form to form as fast as a child’s dæmon; one moment a bat, now a skeletal magpie, now a red-eyed frog, a housecat, a red fox.

“I know what it means,” Mycroft had once heard a friend of his mother’s say, while her fat terrier dæmon panted on the rug next to her. He was standing outside the door with his eye pressed to the crack and Aisa as a keen-eared bat hanging from his arm. He had, at an early age, mastered the art of eavesdropping.

“It means he’s capricious,” the woman went on.

That was not what it meant, and Mycroft knew Mummy knew that.

“She will settle when the time comes,” said Mycroft’s mother serenely, and said nothing else on the matter. Her dæmon had blinked and shown their irritation with the woman and the terrier by means of a narrowing of the barn owl’s dark brown eyes.

Aisa, who had heard what Mycroft had heard, climbed into the pocket of his waistcoat as a scarab as Sherlock rampaged past, his dæmon in the form of a broad-winged owl – a tribute to their mother, no doubt – flapped after him.

“It’s going to be soon,” Mycroft had said when Aisa had crawled out of his pocket.

As if in defiance of his words, she’d become an owl like Sherlock’s dæmon and had nestled onto his shoulder. Her sharp claws dug into his suit, pricking his skin.

“I know,” she said. “But not until it is absolutely necessary.”

Aisa and Mycroft both remembered the day she had settled. It had been an unremarkable one, except for the permanent feeling of forbidding that Mycroft shared with his dæmon, the sword of settling hanging over both their heads.

They were sitting in the parlour. Aisa was perched on the windowsill, watching with keen eagle eyes as a young man in an impeccable suit stopped to talk with their mother. Aisa had recognized the man as one of their mother’s employees, for the man looked too groomed and too severe, with his heavy boa dæmon draped over his shoulders, to be anything other than an agent from MI6.

“Perhaps MI5, Aisa?” Mycroft had suggested, not looking up.

“No,” she countered. “The suit and sidearm could be an active agent – not anyone with a desk job, you can see that in the roughness of the nails on his right hand but not on his left – of any kind, but the tan says foreign, not domestic. You can’t get a tan like that here or from a tanning bed.”

Mycroft nodded.

And so Aisa kept a careful watch on the man, with both an interest in the workings of MI6 and a suspicion of their mother. Mycroft and Aisa had known since they could speak that Mummy held a much higher position in Her Majesty’s government than she liked to let on. After all, what kind of person with a “minor position” in the British government have at her beck and call no less than the Prime Minister, the Foreign and Home Secretaries, respectively, and most of both MI5 and MI6?

Mycroft was at his studies, perched as straight-backed as Aisa as he read chemistry, the difficulties of organic chemistry, specifically the complexities of nomenclature of long-chain alcohols putting up little resistance to an intellect he knew was formidable.

Focused, he read, while keeping a thread of attention fixed on Aisa as she watched. However, his focus was broken as a muffled thud emanated from somewhere upstairs.

Dæmon and boy looked up as another thud echoed, Aisa immediately shifting into a wildcat and glaring.

“I’ll wager it’s Sherlock again,” sighed Aisa, irked by the antics of his little brother.

“Should we go?” asked Mycroft, loath to move.

Aisa cocked her head as another thud, louder than the other two, caused the chandelier to shake. That was answer enough for the two of them. Holding out his hand, he let Aisa flutter onto his fist as a gyrfalcon before she clambered to his neck as a pine marten.

The thumping got louder as Mycroft mounted the stairs, his shoes making no noise on the carpet, Aisa equally silent. She was now a wide-eyed owl, staring forward with big, keen eyes.

Mycroft, without so much as a knock, flung open the door to his brother’s room.

What he found was not unexpected, for Sherlock had taken to conducting “experiments” at the age of six, which usually consisted of some form of destruction. Now, he appeared to be standing on an overturned bookshelf, tossing various china objects at the floor, before hopping to an upset desk and repeating the exercise while his dæmon, Belisarius, as a snow-white ermine, curled about his neck and watched.

“Sherlock,” said Mycroft, and the boy looked up.

He looked as much like their father as Mycroft did like their mother, with his dark hair and his pale eyes.

“I’m busy,” he snapped, and Belisarius bared his little teeth. His brother’s dæmon, as Mycroft had discovered six years earlier, was male.

“With what, exactly? Making a mess?” snapped Mycroft.

Aisa hissed, now a wildcat in Mycroft’s arms, at Belisarius, who hissed right back.

“It’s an experiment,” said Sherlock and now Belisarius bristled, a wildcat like Aisa, obviously anticipating a fight. “I’m testing the shatter patterns of china.”

“Clean it up, Sherlock,” ordered Mycroft. “Before Mummy sees. You know she hates mess.”

Aisa echoed the order with a quiet little growl, now a leopard to deter a defiant attack from Belisarius, who turned into a panther in response.

“Mummy does not hate it,” returned Sherlock, crossing his arms as Belisarius paced to his side, heavy-pawed but quiet.

“She does. You irritate her enough already, Sherlock, so clean it up before she sees. Or ring for the maid. She’ll do it,” said Mycroft, and reached for the bell.

“I don’t irritate Mummy!” cried Sherlock, and Belisarius, still panther-shaped, lifted his lip and snarled at Aisa. She ignored him, preferring to weave herself into Mycroft’s arms as an emerald snake.

“You do,” said Mycroft. “Now clean it up! It’s rude to make the maid do it all.”

“I don’t irritate her!” repeated Sherlock, and now his face was red and his eyes blazed. All of Belisarius’s fur stood up and he growled sharply. “You do!”

“Be quiet, Sherlock,” ordered Mycroft, and he turned to leave.

“You do! You do!” shrieked Sherlock, his child’s voice high and malicious. “I heard her say it, I heard her talk about how you’re a freak, how your dæmon won’t settle, how-”

Mycroft wanted to strangle his little brother in that instant and Aisa acted on this. Surging forward as a lioness, roaring and furious, she seized Belisarius by the ruff of the neck and threw him to the ground. He snarled and became a wildcat to escape her; she shifted accordingly and wrapped him in her coils as a massive black mamba.

Belisarius changed once more, flickering down into a mouse to scamper away, doubtless to spring once more as something fanged.

But Aisa was older and faster and changed into a raven, a shape she’d never taken. With claws and beak, she pinned Belisarius, holding him fast until he whimpered.

“Stop hurting us,” said Sherlock, and now his eyes were bright with tears and anger.

Mycroft could see his brother’s anger and regretted it – he was a little boy, though a brat, still a child – but he said nothing. He simply held out his hand for Aisa, who fluttered to him, still raven-shaped. He did not look at his brother as left, cold and angry and unforgiving.

Wordlessly, they left the room. But a strange feeling had stolen over Mycroft, until he stopped and held Aisa up to his face.

“A raven,” he mused, and smiled, strangely satisfied with her form. A raven was intelligent, resourceful, elusive, and he admired it. And to see, for the first time, a true representation of his personality…

Aisa nodded, similarly fulfilled.

“A good form,” he added, and stroked her dusky feathers.

“A useful one,” supplied Aisa, always practical.

They paused and stared at each other. Then, hopping up onto his shoulder, Aisa shuffled her wings and cawed.

“I think we’ve settled,” said Mycroft.

“Agreed. Now, let’s see about that man from MI6. I think I saw him go off into the garden…”


End file.
